I started writing When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth on July 6th, 2005, while teaching Clarion. The next day, the London Underground and busses were bombed, including the bus I rode to work every morning (I was in Michigan, teaching Clarion, thankfully). These kinds of coincidences can be spooky when you’re a writer. I ended up putting the story away for some months.

When I returned to it, I was fired anew with the story of Felix and Van and their vainglorious struggle to keep the servers online as the world went offline. Once created, apocalyptic anxiety can’t be destroyed — the 1980s fear of nuclear annihilation I grew up with surfaces anew with each theoretical disaster: Y2K, climate change, und so weiter. There’s something primal about a story of the Earth’s impending doom.

I was a sysadmin at an earlier stage in my career and I have infinite respect for the field: sysadmins are the secret masters of the universe, and they keep your life running.

Listeners to my podcast heard me read this story, After the Siege, as it was written, shortly after returning home from a family trip to St Petersburg. My grandmother was born there, back when it was Leningrad, and she lived through the Siege of Leningrad as a little girl. She’d never talked to us about those years, but then, walking through Petersburg, she opened up and the stories came pouring out, stories that scared and appalled me. After the Siege is a science fictional re-telling of those stories, with much artistic license.

I gave first publication rights to this story to Esli, the Russian sf magazine that had published some of my stories in translation before. In return, Elsi has given me the Russian text to release under a Creative Commons license. The first English publication will come shortly in the online magazine The Infinite Matrix, which published my story I, Robot and other pieces.more

I’ve got a story in Future Washington, an anthology that just came out. As the title implies, the anthology collects stories about the future of Washington DC, and in my case, the future of regulation, too. I’ve read about half the stories in the anthology since my contributor’s copy arrived in the mail yesterday and I’ve yet to come up with a dud. Not surprising, given the contributions of writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Joe Haldeman, Brenda Clough and many others.

My story is a novella called “Human Readable,” and of all my short fiction, it is the story I’m most proud of. It’s the tale of a world that’s been upended by hyper-efficient planning algorithms based on ant-colony optimizations, so that Los Angeles has the best traffic in the world. However, when these networks crash, they really crash — cars, surfboards, and many other common conveyances end up catastrophically failing, with concomitant loss of life.

Human Readable is the story of a couple who break up over their relation to the ant-networks. Reiner is a hacker who works on improving the networks. Trish is an activist lawyer who wants to see them regulated. Their irreconcilable differences turn them from being lovers into being political opponents.more

In spring 2004, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf’s classic narratives.

Infinite Matrix magazine published one of these, a story called “I, Robot,” which describes the police state that would have to obtain if you were going to have a world where there was only one kind of robot allowed and only one company was allowed to make it.more

This is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two — netting them about $0.02 an hour — but this is a very different proposition indeed.

There are a lot of firsts in this story:

It’s the first story I’ve written since moving to the UK, and the story is told from the point of view of an English girl

It’s the first in a series of stories I’m writing that riff on the titles of famous SF novels and stories (this one is a play on Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” — also coming are “I, Robot,” “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Jeffty is Five,” and “True Names” — this last with Ben Rosenbaum). This started as a response to Ray Bradbury’s assertion that Michael Moore was a “thief” and a “horrible human being” for using the word “Fahrenheit” in the title of his last movie — but now I’m just finding it fun to deconstruct the stories of the writers who came before me.

It’s the first story that Salon has ever published under a Creative Commons license — which means that you can put it on a P2P network or email it to a friend without running afoul of the law.

I’m really proud of this one: I read it to an audience at the WorldCon last September and the response was really warm and enthusiastic.more